Any illusion that the Nobel Committee harbour regrets about awarding the Nobel Peace Prize (NPP) to war criminals of the calibre of Kissinger and Obama can now be dismissed outright with this latest crime against humanity committed by this obviously corrupt institution. Indeed, it is a criminal fraud against Alfred Nobel who explicitly bequeathed the prize to “Champions of Peace”.

A Triumph of Lies

But surely, it might be asserted, these men of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) ‘champions of Peace’ and I would proffer by argument already detailed on MWC News regarding that other instrument of US Imperialism The Criminal Fraud of the ICC and say, categorically “NO!”. It cannot be possible for people directly involved in these institutions, fully acquainted with the history of their establishment and their contemporary activities to be unaware of how they are being used for propaganda and strategic purposes by the US Imperial Empire.

Syrian Chemical Weapons have clearly been the best counter the Syrians can muster against the nuclear threat from Israel. The Syrians will almost certainly be signed up, ratified and compliant well ahead of Israel and Israel will have to beat Myanmar if they are to avoid yet another odious tick in their pariah-state check-list.

This cynical choice for the NPP is obviously intended to dovetail with the devious intrigues and propaganda surrounding the August 21 Chemical Weapons attack; another fantasy for the Mainstream Media. It ranks among the hypocrisies of Obama and Kerry and their fake, pious indignation condemning the attack as “a moral obscenity by any standard” – except, of course when compared with the use of Napalm and Agent Orange in Vietnam. It clearly would not genuinely “shock the conscience” of men guilty of rolling that dung ball of disinformation that has been among the more recent episodes that include the obscene Rumsfeld hand-shake over the crime that was Halabja, the smearing of Goldstone’s conclusion about White Phosphorous over Gaza or the savagery inflicted at Fallujah.

The BBC might have preferred the alternative choice of Malala Yousafzai, the teenage Pakistani schoolgirl who was shot by the Taliban for championing girls' rights to an education. Truly, I admire the girl – so much more the tragedy to see her cynically abused by the BBC for their propaganda. But the education Malala desired would have been a birthright and a “done deal” in the Afghanistan that existed before the United States destroyed their country in another of its Proxy Wars to undermine the Soviet Union by funding, training, supplying and supporting Osama Bin Laden and his Mujah’adeen. The propaganda is of course wasted on anyone who understands that the current war in Afghanistan is about drugs, resources etc. and the Afghanis are neither “liberated” nor better off, but perhaps the committee thought the Chemical Weapons theme was a little less obvious.

Chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, Thorbjorn Jagland excused this cowardly soft option with the explanation that the Chemical Weapons Convention had "defined the use of chemical weapons as a taboo under international law". But in their gentle nod to the Syrian Chemical Weapons propaganda he seems to have forgotten the long list of abuses of International Law by both the tail and the dog of the modern Empire, all the way from collective punishment to the supreme crime of aggression – studiously excluded from the jurisdiction of the ICC by the world police from high on their podium above the law as non-signatory to the Rome Statute. Here is a man who believes that behaving as if he were born yesterday exempts him from the need for a capacity for moral reasoning, much like the rest of the dribbling audience of the Mainstream Media.

I wonder if Mr. Jagland could read the Daily Mail’s condemnation of the White Widow of Nairobi for her alleged claim that she “raises her sons to be killers” and not reflect that “so does the Queen of England”, despite it being on the same page with an article about the shockingly evil Taliban and their plans to “Murder” Prince Harry and a very large photograph of the heroic Harry in military kit – dressed to kill. Perhaps Mr Jagland should read Prince Harry’s musings about how shooting Afghans with a joystick from a helicopter was “so like a computer game” and reflect how endemic is this psychosis in our Western Civilisation.

The Triumph of Evil

In a recent article on this same subject, expressing hopes for a more meaningful choice by the Nobel Committee, Norman Solomon summoned the words of Edmund Burke who said that,“All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.”

There can be no doubt at all that we live in a time marked by a Triumph of Evil. We’ve been heading in this direction for a long time. Vast wealth has been accumulating in fewer hands at the expense of the broader class of ordinary individuals who participate in what we call a “social system”. Greedy criminals among them have manipulated the means by which we act as an economic collective to further compound their wealth and used that wealth to still further advantage themselves to control the means that shape our society and our collective humanity – our hospitals, our schools and universities, our newspapers, our entertainment. We have reached a time When Criminals Rule The World. War mongering psychopaths foment hatred and violence while a criminally complicit media groom the public mind to absorb it all as normality and “carry on”. Heedless of the warnings of Aldous Huxley that "Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.", or of George Orwell that “If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever.” we have “kept calm” and we have, perhaps, almost arrived. One more economic collapse and the boot will descend and the facts ignored will emerge from the Disneyland fantasy as if from the chest of the hapless victim of an inter-stellar parasite.

Bad enough as it is that so many “good men do nothing.” and there is in any case, very little that ordinary men can do. But when men entrusted with influence and the possibility to make statements that cry out to humanity “like angels, trumpet-tongued” to wake the collective conscience, yet they bend their knee and comply with power, a great crime is committed, a crime against humanity.

No Appeal to Ignorance

The award of the NPP is a statement. When aptly chosen, it’s a powerful political statement. What was desperately needed by our civilisation today was a supreme international statement; one differing from other lesser statements in that it contains within itself the accumulated truth of the whole. That statement the Nobel Committee could have made was to award the prize to Bradley Manning. Here was a true hero, a man who took great personal risk and has in effect paid the ultimate price. Here is a man motivated by that most valuable of all motives – to act on his conscience to do what he can to put right what is evil and wrong.

Among many other insights to the ugly and wicked truth of this endless “War of Terror”, Manning gave the world the “Collateral Murder” video that ripped off the scab from the War in Iraq and let in the air of collective awareness of the reality of this supreme international war crime, this crime of aggressive war that “contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole”.

An uneducated man who reads little more than the sports pages of a tabloid might possibly be unaware of this action taken by Manning and its implications for War and Peace, but not Thorbjorn Jagland.

Nevertheless, in August a petition was initiated by Roots Action Team to urge the Nobel Committee to award their prize to Manning and it quickly collected over 100,000 signatures. I am proud to say that mine was among them and I also wrote directly to the Committee outlining my reasons for so doing (included in the appendix below). That Petition was taken to the committee in Oslo by Norman Solomon.

There can be no appeal to ignorance here.

A Crime Against Humanity

There may have been many options presenting themselves to the Nobel Committee. Had Manning’s worthiness for the prize been trumped by some other choice of debatably comparable worthiness then the matter might dissolve into the haze of subjective opinion. However, this insipid, obscure choice with vague and insubstantial claim to worthiness as a contribution to peace, tainted as it is by its current entanglement in the propaganda war over Syria flies in the face of the very purpose of the NPP and insults the very legacy of Alfred Nobel.

The manifold appeal of Manning’s Popular Nomination as a choice for the NPP stood head and shoulders above all others not only based on the worthiness of the man’s actions in the name of Peace and the actively expressed and widespread support but also in the urgent and dire need for such a statement as this might have carried to the world makes the outcome a glaring failure.

There are crimes of commission and there are lesser crimes of omission. This choice of the Nobel Committee at such a time constitutes an omission, a failure to act appropriately at such a critical time and a time of such urgent need for such an action as it might have been amounts to criminal negligence – a Crime Against Humanity.

Appendix – A Letter to The NPP Committee

Dear Sirs and Madams of the Nobel Peace Prize Committee,

I write to urge you to give serious, positive consideration to the widely supported nomination of Bradley Manning for the Nobel Peace Prize.

There are, in my view, at least three important reasons why Bradley Manning should be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

First and foremost, Bradley Manning has done a great service to the world in the cause of Peace.As that great statesman, John F. Kennedy said “The very word “secrecy” is repugnant in a free and open society”.Kennedy was so prophetic when he said in that speech “There is very grave danger that an announced need for increased security will be seized upon by those anxious to expand its meaning to the very limits of official censorship and concealment”. Indeed, we are now in the grip of this very development and the danger is not only very grave but very real.Bradley Manning has struck a powerful blow against this process. Peace is conditional on the necessity that “man should be what he was born to be; free and independent”.His was a great service to peace.

Second, if this courageous act is not quickly given the support and endorsement of some credible institution, among which institutions such as the Nobel Prize is foremost in world opinion, then those who have most to hide, those who maintain this system of secrecy, who perpetrate the evils it conceals and have been starkly exposed by Bradley Manning will surely punish him to the most extreme measure available to them both to intimidate others who may consider following Bradley Manning’s example and as a desperate measure to preserve the falsehood that he has committed a serious crime against the state.

Third, but I am sure not last, there is urgent need to sound some loud, awakening, trumpet blast of warning from an institution that stands for the rational, enlightened and constructive vision of human destiny, a sharp call that will help shake the sleeping masses from their complaisance in the “Disneyland” illusion cultivated by a corrupt and deceitful global media that all is well in the world; it clearly is not. In our world today the perpetrators of serious crimes against humanity and international law have it in their power, by corrupt abuse of the law itself, to punish those who expose their crimes. Ordinary people need enlightened leadership.

Ladies and gentlemen of the Nobel Prize committee, the time has come for you to stand true to the purpose of Alfred Nobel’s vision and to courageously stand with Bradley Manning.

It is widely felt across the world that your award of the Nobel Prize for Peace to Barack Obama, Commander in Chief of a standing army greater that all the world’s armies put together who has used this standing army to continue the crimes of his predecessor and who has chosen the course not to look back and punish those guilty of the most shocking crimes against Peace of this century was a mistake. You may still stand by this decision; many of us hope you have reflected and come to regret an error made, perhaps in the hope that it would support and encourage Obama to the better choices and the change he had so ardently promised. It clearly has not. Now is the time to put right that error, if you perceive it so, but if you do not, then at least give some comfort to those many among us of the “Free Bradley Manning” view.

Please: Award Bradley Manning your Nobel Prize for Peace; if for nothing else, then merely in the cause of Peace.